LAPTOP manufacturer Asus celebrated its 30th anniversary with a colourful event and product launch in Sydney on October 9, announcing two new laptops for the Australian market.
The featured units were the Zenbook Pro Duo (and its smaller sibling the Zenbook Duo), and the Zenbook Edition 30, with the Duo models boasting innovative second touchscreens.
Asus are declaring the Zenbook Pro Duo as “The laptop of tomorrow”, featuring a Pantone-validated 15.6-inch 4K (3840x 2160) HDR OLED touchscreen display , while under the bonnet it has an Intel 9th Generation i9 2.4 or 2.6Ghz processor an a 6Gb Nivida RTX 2060 graphics card. All this power comes at a price, however – more specifically, a recommended retail price of $4,499.
The smaller Zenbook Duo has a more reasonable $1,699 pricetag, but lacks the useful graphics card of the Pro version (it has a Nvidia MX250 instead of the RTX2060) and a smaller screen (14 inches) with as 1920×1080 display, so may not quite have the same appeal to gamers despite being about $3,000 cheaper.
The 13-inch version of the standard ZenBook range will be exclusively available in Australia in the limited “Edition 30” version, which according to Asus “is a special, limited production run variant of the ZenBook UX334 that features luxurious design accents including a genuine leather lid cover and an 18-karat rose gold plated logo; and exclusively equipped with a complete set of premium accessories”, along with a Screenpad 2.0 touchpad display.
The leather is sourced from Italy and hand-stitched and the unit is being pitched as a fashion piece as well as a functional laptop – which might explain the RRP of AUD$2,799.
The 14 and 15 inch versions of the Zenbook lack the hand-stitched leather finish and accompanying accessories but are also much cheaper, with the RRP on the UX434 (14″) model starting from $1,799 and the UX 534 (15″) model starting from $2,499.
As well as being a product launch, the event also included a panel with YouTube personalities Austin Evans, Josiah “Jazza” Brooks, Kane Vato-Muehlenbeck & Pia Muehlenbeck, and Ethan “Ozzy Man” Marrell, along with a brief awards ceremony acknowledging Asus’ business and industry partners.
